Text: Isaac & Wang Dan

Yesterday (October 14), the 5V5 multi-hero skill shooting mobile game "Operation Apocalypse", independently developed by NetEase, issued a suspension announcement. According to the announcement, due to the game's performance not as expected, the product will close downloads, stop recharging, and new user registration on October 14, and will be suspended and the server will be shut down on December 12.

From the public beta on August 30 to the announcement of the outage yesterday, this product has only been online for 46 days.

The performance of Lenovo's game before its launch, many people may feel a little sudden: "Operation Apocalypse" got the version number in February this year, first exposed the actual machine video in March, and appeared at the NetEase Game 520 press conference in May, and the number of reservations on the whole network before the public beta in August has exceeded 10 million. On the day of the open beta, it topped the list of free iOS games in China and the list of new TapTap products...... The momentum doesn't look weak.

According to the official introduction, "Operation Apocalypse" focuses on "completely 0 values, 100% competition", and has been certified by the Guangdong Game Industry Association as "0 values for the appearance of all games";

The official has also previously posted pictures to pay tribute to the well-known shooting games "Counter-Strike" and "Overwatch", perhaps also emphasizing the team's pondering and emphasis on competitive shooting gameplay.

As of today, "Operation Apocalypse" has a rating of 6.9 and 6.3 on TapTap and Haoyou Kuaibang, respectively. It looks low, but it's not a crash for a competitive game. So what went wrong with this product?

In terms of the overall gameplay structure, it is not difficult to see that "Operation Apocalypse" is a typical hero shooting + blasting/team competition. The heroes in the game have a total of five positions: reconnaissance, vanguard, tactics, guard, and support, and each has 3 skills. According to the different roles of skills, it is also subdivided into fire suppression, teleportation, stealth, detection, and damage...... and so on.

In terms of character skill design, "Operation Apocalypse" is not bad, and even has some ingenuity of its own. Of course...... In the eyes of many players, this ingenuity is a bit self-indulgent - take the phantom pictured above, for example, her second skill vision blockade is to create an enchantment that she can see the outside, but the outside but can't see the inside. Players who play hero shooting will understand at a glance: this is a one-way smoke at the level of anti-sky, and as soon as this skill comes out, the sky that likes to snipe in the middle door has collapsed.

There are many similar designs in the game, such as one-way perspective shield walls, flying bombs, thick and long piercing arrows (imagine Hanzo ultimate as a small skill), and various full-image flow skills...... Whether the design of these supermodels will make the balance collapse, let's not care - the balance needs time to verify, but "Operation Apocalypse" has no time. Judging from the feedback from some players, at least it makes for a part of the experience that is quite innovative and interesting enough.

However, from the perspective of adaptability to the positioning of the game mode, "Operation Apocalypse" may still lack enough thought: put this design into the system of "Overwatch", it looks better; But in a short TTK system like Valorant, such a bold approach can make the situation too confusing.

It's not uncommon for NetEase to unleash design and encourage innovation like this, but not enough to control it as a whole, in NetEase's internal projects. For example, the previous MOBA mobile game "Marvel Super War" has also made a lot of really interesting and innovative hero designs, but the competitive experience is really difficult to say. In addition, this product has been in operation for less than 2 years, and it has been discontinued on June 17.

For example, Thanos, who once disgusted countless people

Having said that, this is not the most criticized point of "Operation Apocalypse". Its more serious shortcomings still fall on the most basic operation experience and competitive experience.

It all starts with one of the core ideas of Operation Apocalypse: adapting to mobile. In order to fully adapt to the rhythm of mobile gamers, they first made a design that went beyond the average intensity of short TTK games, as mentioned above; At the same time, in terms of operation, some settings have been added to take care of the player, such as firearm assisted aiming.

In the game, there are three different subdivision modes for secondary aiming, which are still very user-friendly - once enabled, you only need to move the crosshair closer to the enemy hero's body part, and the system will help you absorb it.

However, while aiming assist lowers the threshold for shooting skills, it also disrupts the game's competitive balance. In short TTK games, marksmanship is a big plus, and you may have heard terms like "emergency stop", which is the basic operation of a game system with large scattering and slow movement. If the player only needs a brainless gun, there are actually a lot of better options for shooting games.

So when those core players who want to fight marksmanship see the situation of new players running around the streets with assisted aiming, they can only be forced to turn on the assist. Everyone is open, everyone is running, and the game has a certain deviation from the original positioning.

Of course, we can't rule out the possibility that, with proper exploration, Operation Apocalypse can find a new positioning that adapts to the market. However, this requires the team to have quite detailed and in-depth research and polishing on the basic gun sense and operation coefficient. And judging from the feedback from players, Operation Apocalypse still doesn't do enough in this regard.

String these together for analysis - in fact, there is no need for any analysis, the personal feelings mentioned by the player above are the best summary: mobile hero shooters do have a vacancy in the ecological niche, and "Operation Apocalypse" as a meal replacement can indeed meet some of the needs, but the core quality is not in place. If it's really the core players of Hero Shooter, most of them will probably choose to stay on the PC side.

This part of the core players can't hold it, not to mention most of the other traditional FPS players, it's also not the best choice. Such a position that is not up or down makes it stand out from everyone after all.

A competitive game, if the core gameplay can't retain people, then even if the gun skin is good-looking and the hero is cool, it will naturally be useless. Since its launch more than a month ago, "Operation Apocalypse" has rushed to the top 1 of the iOS national game free list and the 118th place on the best-selling list; By early September, the game had fallen out of the top 200 best-selling lists.

In addition, it is worth noting that some netizens said after previous comparisons that "Operation Apocalypse" looks similar to "Hyper Front" - the latter is a 5V5 multi-hero skill shooting mobile game launched by NetEase in some overseas regions in January 2022. So some people speculate that "Operation Apocalypse" is the version of "Hyper Front" in China.

One of the heroes of Operation Apocalypse, Thunder Wing

Thunder Ray, one of the heroes of Hyper Front

According to a number of foreign media reports, in December 2022, Riot Games filed a lawsuit, saying that the map, characters, weapons and other designs of "Hyper Front" have many similarities with "Valorant", and that "Hyper Front" infringes its intellectual property rights.

Riot Games sued NetEase Games, alleging that Hyper Front plagiarized Valorant. Source GamesIndustry.biz.

Shortly after Riot filed the lawsuit, Hyper Front issued a shutdown announcement on April 3, 2023, announcing that the game would shut down its servers on April 10 of the same year.

"Hyper Front" will issue a discontinuation announcement in 2023. The announcement did not specify the reason for the suspension, nor did it mention Riot's lawsuit.

The official of "Operation Apocalypse" has never said that it is the national version of "Hyper Front", and it is unclear whether the suspension of this product is related to the above incident.

But in any case, such a case is likely to once again wash away the views of some practitioners and players on the expectations of the game: the products of large manufacturers do not necessarily hold the gold medal of avoiding death; Data support such as the number of appointments and free lists is not enough to package tickets for the future performance of the product...... In project initiation and R&D, any team may take the wrong design direction and bear the corresponding risks after the product is launched, and large manufacturers are no exception.

From another point of view, perhaps both large and small factories should take care of themselves, think more about what players need, and worry less about success formulas and proposition essays.

is as strong as Sony, with 8 years of research and development, a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, and a halo of "big manufacturers + industry veterans + previously market-proven success", "Xingming Special Attack", which also died violently less than two weeks after it was launched. How many more opportunities for trial and error can the market leave us?

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